The Blue Note: A Classical Piano Blog

Monday, June 2, 2014

"A good sight-reader's skill is not the ability to read more notes than everyone else, but to read fewer."*

In a not-so-distant past I myself was given to marveling at how great sight-readers could see so many notes at once and play in tempo. How was that possible? In short: It's not.

An accomplished sight-reader does not see all the notes. Through experience and practice he or she has assimilated a body of skills and knowledge -- in music theory, analysis, style, piano technique -- such that allow them to infer learned patterns and make assumptions based on sparse indications (key notes and other markers) in the score.

A parallel can be made with an average literate adult. A person who can fluently read this blog post isn't so much someone that's particularly talented at seeing a lot of letters, as someone who has learned to instantly recognize and make sense of the patterns of written language.

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Dwayne Cannon

About Me

I AM an American pianist and teacher living Paris, France. I studied piano (B.M.) at Shorter College near Atlanta, Georgia, briefly at Louisiana State University, and finally at the Sorbonne in Paris (M.M.).
THE TITLE of my blog may seem contradictory, since the jazz world has so completely appropriated the term 'Blue Note'. Though I'm a big fan of the genre, I'd like to reclaim the term in the name of classical music, for it was the writer George Sand who coined it in describing Chopin's music. " Et puis la note bleue résonne et nous voilà dans l’azur de la nuit transparente..."
OF COURSE the reference to Chopin has a more primary significance. I am currently doing an in-depth study of the opus 10 and 25 Études, and I felt compelled to keep this journal of sorts. I'll talk about the difficulties of learning these works, the problems encountered and to how to resolve them, as well as any number of (probably useless) digressions that might pop up along the way.